Held Together with Nail Glue and Tape

And probably a few prayers too.

Hi,

I hope last week’s announcement excited you! If you missed it, read all the good news here. Also, Storm the Gates published last week. So grab your copy! Then come back for some drama.

Before I get into what happened, I just want to assure you that I just gave directions. That was all I did. Who am I? I’m Ran, the son and sidekick of a quiet man with all the magic. Read our stories in the Curse Breaker series.

It’s been another dramatic week here, so what happened?

Well, I noticed the “priority reprints” the printer promised to do for the proofs of the first three Robin of Larkspur books and the first omnibus for that series, still haven’t arrived. But the order for the reprint went into the system on Oct. 30, and the support person assured us that they would take priority because they were the ones that printed the edges as a pale pink instead of red.

Since I’m nosey, I reminded the Scribe about this and suggested she ask what was going on. So she did that, and the support person replied that the machine that does the edge printing/sprayed edges broke, and they are waiting for someone to repair it. They have no idea when it will be fixed or when our order will print.

So the proofs are delayed indefinitely, and it feels like the sprayed/printed edges are cursed at this point. Am I wrong?

But that wasn’t the only drama this week. What else happened?

Melinda attended in a meeting at the office of her day job, as she often does when not writing about us. All was fine until Melinda removed her glasses to clean them.

But this time, her glasses had enough and the arm snapped off leaving the scribe with an unexpected problem in the middle of a meeting. Unfortunately, she doesn’t work anywhere close to home so Melinda kind of freaked out. How could she drive home when she couldn’t see?

I volunteered to drive her, but that didn’t go over well. Melinda said, “you’re a fictional character. You can’t drive.”

That’s probably true but I offered to try anyway. I want that on record.

The meeting ended a little later and Melinda asked her coworkers if anyone had super glue so she could glue the arm back on the frame. Unfortunately, no one had any. Someone offered velcro, but that wouldn’t work.

So she tried to tape the frame back together, but Melinda couldn’t see where it had broken off. So she didn’t get the arm lined up right and the glasses listed hard to one side when she put them on. Unfortunately, she has astigmatism so she has to look at the center of the lens or things get weird.

People were looking kind of two dimensional and slanted like they were paper dolls not real people. So she needed a better fix.

Thankfully, a coworker had nail glue, and since she was a member of the glasses wearing community, she took the scribe’s broken glasses and through a combination of nail glue and scotch tape and magic, got the frame more or less back together. But that was just a temporary fix.

Things still didn’t look right but they weren’t as off as before, so Melinda asked to leave early so she could get her glasses fixed or order a new pair, whichever the glasses place would allow. But she needed her prescription from her ophthalmologist…

(The scribe had to get a medical eye doctor after a scare with her retina during the pandemic. But we scared it into behaving, so it’s fine now. She also gets ocular migraines and this doctor monitors that too, but I digressed again.)

This is where things get weird, folks. Melinda grabbed her things and hurried to the parking garage to find her car—with us in tow of course! We couldn’t let her drive home alone. So Papa, Uncle Miren, and I piled into her car.

Before we left the garage, Melinda called her ophthalmologist's office to ask if they could email her a copy of her prescription. They said no, she could come pick it up or they could mail it.

For some reason, they aren’t allowed to email eyeglasses prescriptions. I guess glasses are controlled substances? What is NY state afraid the scribe will do with a glasses prescription in her inbox? Take over the world?

I have no other theories for why this might be. It’s not like you could do anything except get glasses with a glasses prescription.

Resigned to her fate, the scribe put the car in gear and off we went onto I-95. I operated the gps app, obviously. Papa has a map inside his head, but I had a talking map in my hot little hands. So I directed the scribe onto I-287, then she misread a sign and turned onto exit 9N for the Hutch.

Since that’s the wrong way, the gps app recalculated. But it found a new route and I directed the scribe to get back on I-287 and to stay there until the exit for I-684.

And do you know what? They paved the lanes on I-684 so that when you change langes, you drive over a wailing strip. I don’t know if that’s the right word for it, but all four the tires wail when they roll over it. At first, that rattled the scribe, and Melinda thought she hit something.

Papa had to reassure her that the car and everyone in it was fine. I’m not sure Melinda believed it until she had to move over to let a truck enter the highway and heard the high pitched wailing sound again. I thought the poor dear would jump out of her skin if she rolled over them again.

By the third lane change, Melinda relaxed a little and just in time too because signs said we were close to the town we needed. There were more numerical routes and a bunch of turns after that but they didn’t wail, and I kind of missed that.

38 minutes after leaving the parking garage across the street from her day job, Melinda parked the car outside a short building covered with glass windows. Since she let me hold onto her phone, I agreed to stay in the car with Papa and Uncle Miren.

Did I snoop while she was gone? You bet I did! But she hasn’t started writing the Riders of the Apocalypse trilogy so I have no spoilers to give out yet.

Melinda returned five minutes later with her glasses prescription in hand and then she took the phone away from me so she could search for somewhere to get her glasses fixed. Her first choice, a mom and pop shop she’d gone to for many years, had closed forever. So that was out.

That left Walmart as the only other option that might not charge her a fortune. Anyway, Melinda called the Walmart Vision center in the area and discovered that they are only open from 9 am to 5 pm, and it was 4:25 pm then. After she ended the call, I hit the button to make the gps app give us directions from here to there. But it said we wouldn’t get there before 5 pm.

So I hit the home option, and the gps app recalculated and found a route from the ophthalmologist's office back to the scribe’s apartment. It estimated we’d arrive shortly before 5 pm.

That wasn’t a fun drive since the arm started to separate from the frame again, so things were a bit blurry for the scribe. There was much shouting, “watch out!” But we made it despite the gps app sending us on the most convoluted route possible between the two towns.

After we parked outside Melinda’s apartment building, she messaged her boss and asked for permission to work from home the next day so she could go to Walmart’s Vision center on her lunch break. But that’s a story for next time!

New Podcast Episodes & Videos

Listen to our podcast in your player of choice. Or Watch it on YouTube.

New Releases and Book Sales

Follow the campaign to get notified when it launches. The preview page has the latest cover mockups and previews of the illustrated pages.